A Space for Agency: Rhetorical Agency, Spatiality, and the Production of Relations in Supermodernity
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Date
2005-05-02
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Abstract
Rhetorical agency has surfaced recently as an important source of discussion and debate in contemporary rhetorical theory. In some recent scholarship, including Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's and Carl G. Herndl and Adela C. Licona's, rhetoricians have worked to rearticulate a role for agency after and within the de-centering of the modernist self suggested in much poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking, establishing in the process a conception of agency as "a field of relations" operating outside of the human subject but nevertheless constraining and enabling potential actions. In what I term both/and conceptions of agency, external determinants, such as ideology, historicality, and sociality, serve to enable and constrain agentive capacity by limiting, as Herndl and Licona suggest, the agent functions available to human subjects. Missing from these accounts, however, is how spatiality—in collaboration with historicality and sociality—constitutes a similar external determinant constraining and enabling agent functions in social systems and, more specifically, in rhetorical situations.
In this thesis, I address this gap by situating rhetorical agency as a field of relations involving various determinants, including spatiality, historicality, and sociality, that together serve to produce relations within the conditions of late capitalism. Focusing specifically on spatiality in the production of relations, I argue that rhetorical theory tends to privilege symbolic or imagined spaces over real or material spaces, a preference that, as Roxanne Mountford suggests, often ignores how material arrangements serve as constraints within communicative events. Furthermore, and as I argue in this thesis, recognizing how real and imagined spaces produce relations in lived spaces may in turn suggest additional agent functions already available within rhetorical spaces.
To illustrate how agency functions as a field of relations in rhetorical spaces, I focus on non-places—ubiquitous utilitarian spaces such as airport terminals, malls, supermarkets, etc.—that, as Marc Augé argues, are designed to facilitate specific roles or agent functions. As such, non-places, as described by Augé, offer a unique social space in which to examine the limits of agency as a social location producing relations insofar they constrain agency by limiting occupants' shared identities, relations, and histories.
In particular, I examine two specific non-places—the international airport terminal and the first-year composition classroom—in terms of the agentive potentials constituting relations within these spaces. As an introduction to non-places and their importance within the conditions of late capitalism, and in particular their capacities to constrain relations, identities, and histories expressive of anthropological places, I offer an analysis of terminal space in which I argue that, by virtue of their role as utilitarian transit spaces, terminals serve to limit the agent functions available to travelers. In this respect, I argue, travelers are interpellated, in the Althusserian sense, into de-historicized agent functions always already constituted within the terminal's field of relations. In Chapter 3, I extend these arguments, suggesting that the first-year composition classroom may be understood as a similar form of non-place, constraining student's shared relations, identities, and histories through pedagogies designed exclusively around the inhabitation of imagined geographies. Building on Edward W. Soja's concept of the trialectics of spatiality, I argue that composition studies' emphases on imagined geographies, such as the discourse community, serve to mask the material conditions informing the teaching and practice of writing in composition courses. To reveal additional agent functions available to student writers in classroom non-place, I conclude, compositionists should develop pedagogies that work to balance emphases on real, imagined, and lived spaces and their complex interrelationships within the production of relations.
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space, non-place, rhetorical theory, composition theory, postmodern theory, rhetorical agency, terminal, classroom
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Degree
MA
Discipline
English
